Talk:Realism

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Realism is included in the 2007 Wikipedia for Schools, or is a candidate for inclusion in future versions. Please maintain high quality standards, and make an extra effort to include free images, because non-free images cannot be used on the CDs.

This article should be moved to realism (literature) when the new software is installed; see naming conventions, the point about ambiguity. "Realism" means something different in the visual arts, and something different stdddill in philosophy (in philosophy, it means many different things). --LMS

The references to de Balzac in the section on Visual Arts is confusing, since literature is not a "visual" art. JimD 20:42, 2004 Mar 13 (UTC)

There also need to be references to realism in theater. -Branddobbe 18:37, Mar 30, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Realpolitik (etymology)

Are you sure that the etymology of "Realpolitik" is correct? (it affects the meaning of the word). I agree that it comes from German. But there, it is understood rather as a combination of real (in the sense of reality) and Politik (politics), see German Wikipedia

Avi Mash is tight

[edit] Repairing Christian Vandalism

The cults are trying to censor reality. They keep cutting out the following.--Marcperkel 07:04, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Realism in Religion

- Realism is the religious practice of the Church of Reality. The Church of Reality is religion based on believing in everything that is real. Members of the Church of Reality call themselves Realists. --Marcperkel 07:03, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

--141.153.164.21 04:31, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merriam Webster copypaste

The definition in the first sentence is identical to Merriam-Webster's definition at m-w.com.

[edit] Out of Place Sentence

"Tennessee Williams was able to use realism with the greatest security." What is that? That appears at the end of the article, after external links. It seems very out of place. I'm just asking here before I delete. Feel free to contact me on my talk page. Copysan 09:19, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removed material

JA: The following material appears to be a personal essay on the subject of determinism, off-topic for the article on realism. I am placing it here for reconsideration until it can be sourced and possibly distributed elsewhere. Jon Awbrey 02:08, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps a way to describe realism is as a model of the universe as a big machine operating in a predictable way according to mathematical principles. This model has been around for over 300 years and has served us well. It disposed of tiresome philosophical issues which could not be quantified, dumped the idea of an interfering God and freed intellectual thought in the West from the constraints of religious dogma. Realism has been an adequate model for most of the human enterprise, and has facilitated amazing technological advances. The same mathematics used by Newton to predict the motion of the planets helped put a man on the moon. But during the last century some of our greatest minds have been gently gnawing away at realism. Studies on the nature of light and of subatomic particles have shown that realism is an inadequate and incomplete model of reality. This discovery has had little impact on most scientific endeavor, since its implications were disturbing and most scientists, including many physicists, have been happy to ignore them. Only now, when we seek solutions to unprecedented ecological and psychological crises, are the assumptions of realism being seriously re-examined.

The demise of realism began with observations by Max Planck at the turn of the twentieth century on how light was emitted by hot objects. He noted that light energy was emitted in discrete packets, ‘quanta’, not as a continuum as had been supposed. This observation led Einstein and Planck to show that light could paradoxically behave both as a wave and as a particle (a photon): it depended on how it was observed. This was the seed of a quiet revolution which has gathered pace during this and the last century - the realization that the common-sense view of the world is wrong. The early twentieth century was an exciting time in physics. Einstein showed that space and time were a continuum, not separate things. He also deduced his famous equation E=mc2 to describe the relationship between mass (m) and electromagnetic energy (E)and (c)the speed of light, and in particular predicted that no object could travel faster than the speed of light. Other physicists were developing the ‘planetary’ theory of the atom with electrons in orbit around a central nucleus. This was very successful, providing an explanation for the properties of chemical elements. But by the 1920s the planetary model was already questioned: electrons were shown not to be solid ‘bits’ of matter like planets - they could exhibit wave or particle properties just as could light. There were other problems with this model: why didn’t negatively charged electrons collapse into a positively charged nucleus, and why did they stay in particular orbits? Where did the energy for their motion come from? Attempts to describe the strange behavior of subatomic particles led to a new type of mathematics known as quantum mechanics. It was realized that the wave aspect of such particles was not like the kind of wave formed by a disturbance on water, but was rather a wave of probability revealing the likelihood that a particle would be found in a particular place when observed. Probability waves were bell-shaped: the chance of finding the particle was highest in the centre and less and less likely as one moved further away from it, but significantly the probability of finding the particle never became zero however far away in the universe one tried to measure it - its influence was potentially present everywhere. This implied in turn that since the influence of each electron from any atom could be found everywhere, everything is potentially in touch with everything else.

Quantum mechanics presented other challenges to conventional thought: it predicted that it was not possible to measure both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle simultaneously. This was the famous ‘Uncertainty Principle’ and Einstein was very unhappy about it. Newtonian mechanics was the bed-rock of conventional science, and accurate determination of position and velocity of objects enabled one to predict their future behavior. He could not accept the ‘fuzziness’ of Uncertainty and believed that there must be other as-yet unknown factors, ‘hidden local variables’, which could be discovered and used to measure position and speed accurately. He asserted ‘God does not play dice with the universe’, to which Neils Bohr, a proponent of Uncertainty, replied ‘Don’t tell God what to do!’ (Goswami, 1993) Einstein became obsessed with proving that it must be possible to measure both position and momentum of sub-atomic particles simultaneously, but despite his genius he was apparently proved wrong, not only in regard to uncertainty but also in his belief that nothing could move faster than the speed of light. In a sense, Einstein’s own thinking became trapped by the speed of light. Max Plank commented "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Hmmm, it's not obvious what this has to do with realism in any of the senses discussed in the article. Perhaps is meant to be about the debate between scientific realism and instrumentalism, but I can't see how that could be right either. Metamagician3000 14:46, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Confusing para

I've removed the following from the end of the philosophy section: "However, there are many schools that oppose this train of thinking. The burden of proof remains on the theorist who claims to have knowledge of what is really real. For example, there is nothing contradictory about the claim that what is really real is an idea in the mind of God. In other words, Bishop Berkeley's Idealism is a form of realism." I find this very confusing and disjointed, but perhaps that's my failing. I'd be very happy if someone could rework it so that the connections between the ideas here are clearer - as well as the connection with the immediately preceding para. At the moment, the first sentence seems to say that the view discussed at the end of the previous para is commonly rejected. But the second sentence seems to say that this is wrong (according to whom, though?). The third sentence is written as an explication of the previous one ("In other words..."), but it doesn't seem to be at all. Please explain, someone. Metamagician3000 14:42, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Don't recall where this was. However, the statement "Bishop Berkeley's Idealism is a form of Realism" is logically true and we ought to find a place for it in an articla on REalism. Joseane 07:56, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Redirecting to Realism (disambiguation)

The current state of this article is horrible. If one looks through the history there have been major removals of content resulting in a fairly broken and incoherent article. The main issue is that this article's content has also has significant overlaps with the topically focused articles on realism. Thus it is probably best to skip the attempt at a general description of realism separate from any kind and just link to the disambiguation page itself. I have done this. --JeffersonM 04:11, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately this is backwards and has forked the page histories. The page Realism (disambiguation) should redirect here instead. Will try to solve this at WP:RM. Dekimasu 14:45, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merged sections

Scientific realism is a philosophy of science, and the only entry under the section Science, so I've moved that to the Philosophy section.

I've also moved Literature to be a subsection of Arts, especially because there was some overlap on at least one entry: Magic Realism is a genre of both literature (Marquez et al.) and other arts. Clicketyclack 10:29, 26 March 2007 (UTC)